Are there any parsers out there you explicitly trust to get it right every
time? I don't.
I know of one, http://validator.w3.org/. Are you say though that User Agents are generally better/fast at parsing/rendering valid XHTML than they are valid HTML?

They may well do, but they are still guessing if there are
no end tags. I'm much more happy to explicitly declare my design than have
parsers guessing at what I've designed, the performance trade off is not so
great.


I like to write valid markup too, and if your HTML is valid (written against the DTD) then the parser doesn't have to guess anything, I don't see your point as to why valid XHTML is technically better than than valid HTML.

Now go into the area of accessibility, how are you going to tell all sorts
of user agents and devices the full semantic meaning of the markup. What
about when aural.css becomes mature? Will complex document in HTML4 be as
exact as those following XML syntax?


Yes, if you write it against the DTD and follow accessibility guidelines. There is no difference between the semantics or the accessibility of HTML4.1 and XHTML1.0.

In my view, you cannot fully mark up
documents with a trusted explicit semantic fullness without and XML
definition. The border here might be small, but it's small enough for one
definition to allow for best of interpretation and the other an explicit
interpretation.

Well-formedness has nothing to do with semantics.

Except for the reasons give by Peter Ottrey the only technical reason for using XHTML is that you need the XML (this being the only technical difference between HTML4.1 and XHTML 1.0 ). Any other reason simply comes done to a matter of personal preference.

Chris.

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